Which Causes of an Experience Are Also Objects of the Experience?

Abstract

It is part of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences that objects seem to be presented to us. The first guide to objects is their perceptual presence. Further reflection shows that we take the objects of our perceptual experiences to be among the causes of our experiences. However, not all causes of the experience are also objects of the experience. This raises the question indicated in the title of this paper. We argue that taking phenomenal presence as the guide to the objects of perception, we can see that at least in two sensory modalities, smell and touch, there is no uniform answer to this question. The objects of olfactory and tactile experiences can move along the causal chain. Accordingly, the content of olfactory and tactile experience may vary. 0. The content of perception By ‘perceptual experiences’ we mean here experiences associated with the process of apparently gaining information through the five external senses: vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste. Perceptual experiences form a variety of sensory experiences in general; other varieties may include experiences that are not clearly associated with the process of external perception. In visual or auditory imagining, experiences are not produced by external senses. Bodily sensations, possibly some types of emotional experiences, or experiences of the passage of time may involve sensory modalities other than those associated with the five external senses. Perception provides our primary access to the contingent features of the world around us, and at the first sight, this is what distinguishes perceptual experience from other sensory experiences. Through perception, we gain a conception of the world, and we acquire knowledge of its nature. The term 'content of experience' may be used in different senses (see Siegel 2013), but here we mean by the 'content' of an experience simply the way the experience presents the world. Philosophical interest in this feature is motivated by a number of considerations. According to a strong current in the empiricist tradition, perceptual observation is the neutral arbiter among different theories of the world. To use Quine's 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a workshop at Central European University, and at talks at the University of Bristol and the University of Cardiff. The authors are very grateful for audiences for their comments. Research for this paper has received funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. FP7238128, and from the project BETEGH09 supported by MAG Zrt.